Paul Yoon’s debut collection of stories, Once the Shore, is one of two short story collections to get on Publisher’s Weekly’s Best Books of 2009. (The other one, which made to the top ten list, is In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin. See my blog entries on Feb. 10 and Feb 13, 2009.) Yoon, a Korean American, was born in New York City. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Wesleyan University. He currently lives in Boston. Two of his stories have been chosen for The Best American Short Stories: 2006 and The Pen/O.Henry Prize Stories: 2009. His book, which came out in April, 2009, was not widely reviewed, but received favorable reviews in some good places: New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe.
I read Once the Shore recently and recommend it to you. All the stories take place on an island, which Yoon names Solla, based on the actual island Cheju, which is sixty miles south of the Korean mainland; approximately forty miles long and twenty miles wide. Yoon has said that although a sense of place is very important to him, when he had finished Once the Shore he realized that he had changed everything about the island—geography, events, history—and that the stories were not about Cheju at all. Yoon has also said that he was most interested in exploring the effect of outside forces invading an isolated environment and changing people’s lives on the island between the military occupation following World War II and its present reincarnation as a visa-free tourist destination.
However, Yoon’s wonderfully lyrical stories are no more about Cheju/Solla Island than Sherwood Anderson’s stories are about Winesburg/Clyde, Ohio, nor are they any more about the social effects of the military occupation of Korea than Turgenev’s stories in Sportsman’s Sketches are about the social suppression of the serfs by the Russian nobility. Stories have to take place somewhere, of course, and they often have to have some sort of recognizable social context. But those requirements may be more necessary corollaries than fictional focus.
If the Irish short-story writer Frank O’Connor were still alive, he would point to Once the Shore as an exemplum of his theory that the short story as a genre most often deals with what he called “a submerged population group,” (not to be confused with the current politically correct “diversity”) and that it most often focuses on human loneliness.
Paul Yoon’s book is not a social document, nor a “story cycle” parading as a socio-realistic “composite novel,” but rather a collection of self-sufficient, independent stories about individual human complexity in the tradition of other great short-story writers such as Turgenev, Chekhov, William Trevor, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Munro, and Alistair Macleod. Mind you, I am not saying Yoon is an equal to that exalted group of short story masters, but he is a sensitive, knowledgeable, and talented student of their tradition.
I am sure Yoon knows these great writers. He mentions MacLeod’s Island as one of his favorite books. And anybody who recognizes what a great short story writer MacLeod is already has my attention. The tradition within which Yoon has expertly placed himself might be called “lyrical realism.” It was pioneered by those two great Russians, Turgenev and Chekhov. When you read a story in this tradition, you begin moving confidently along as if you were living in the real world, made up of concretely detailed objects, inhabited by fully rounded characters who seems like people you might actually know. However, as you read, you begin to experience a sense of an alternate reality that is not made up of “stuff that happens,” but rather made up of words, sentences, rhythms, metaphors, fantasy, fairy tale, formality, tone, meaning, significance. Events in such stories may seem to be events that happen in the world of everyday reality, but at any moment, with a subtle shift, events unfold that can only happen in the world of wish or fear. However, by this time, you have been so gradually captured by the rhythm and tone of the story’s language that you will accept anything.
Take the title story of Yoon’s collection, his first published work, chosen for the 2006 Best American Short Stories. The story takes an actual historical event, the 2001 Ehime Maru incident, in which a Japanese fishery school training vessel was sunk by the U.S. nuclear submarine USS Greeneville, killing nine Japanese fishermen, and shifts it from the coast of Hawaii to the coast of Korea, the locale of his fictional island Solla. Changing the drowned Japanese to Korean, Yoon tells the story of a twenty-six-year old waiter at one of the island’s resort hotels, whose brother is killed in the accident. Against this story of loss, he balances the story of an American woman in her sixties visiting the resort whose husband has only been dead a few months. She tells the waiter how her husband, stationed in the South Pacific during the War, came to the island on a furlough and carved a heart with their initials in a cave on the island. Although she gradually realized that her husband had lied about this, she wants to locate the cave to somehow find the husband who left her to go to war but never really returned the same man.
The young waiter is also seeking some sort of reconciliation; he is figuratively looking for the mythical center of the ocean that his brother had once told him they could find together. When he takes the woman to the caves, he thinks it is possible that this island, his home, is that center of the ocean. After serving her a special communal meal, he takes her into a cave, where with a sharp stone she begins carving on the wall a design that he thinks could be the words of a language “long forgotten.”
Yoon delicately weaves the two disparate stories together, and the finished fabric gives us a completely unified tapestry that reminds us that although we are ultimately alone, there is always the possibility of finding others who share our loneliness—a discovery that, paradoxically, unites us in the great web of human experience.
In Yoon’s stories, it is not merely plot, as-if-real characters, a real place, or a social/historical context that achieves this, but rather the rhythm and tone of a sensitive storyteller using language to create an alternate world that objectifies our deepest wishes and our profoundest fears.
Once the Shore, published by Sarabande Books, is available in paperback. Buy yourself a copy for Christmas. I think you will agree it is a paradigm of the short story as a beautiful form.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
First Anniversary of "Reading the Short Story"
Today, November 16, 2009, marks the one-year anniversary of Charles May’s blog “Reading the Short Story.” It was one year ago today that, calling myself a “cheerleader for the short story,” I announced my intention to write a blog in which, on a regular basis, I would post comments about reading and studying the short story, a form that I taught and wrote about for forty years before I retired four years ago from California State University, Long Beach.
In the past year, I have written sixty blog posts for this site, most of them fairly substantial discussions of new short story collections, individual short stories, and other matters of note to those interested in the short story as a form. Although I have not always succeeded, I have tried to focus on significant theoretical and generic issues, using individual collections and stories as examples of those issues.
I do not have a counter for this blog, but noticed this morning that the counter that ticks off those who have visited my user profile turned over to 1,000. I don’t know what this means. I really do not know how many people have visited the blog occasionally or how many read it regularly, although I do have twenty-eight “followers,” whatever that means.
One writes to be read, so I am grateful to those who read this blog regularly and who stumble on it while doing a Google search. I am especially grateful to those who take the time to write comments. I have tried to respond to every comment I have received, and I will continue to do so. I started the blog as a means by which I could engage in dialogue with other short story fans about the form that we love. The one thing I miss most since my retirement is the opportunity to talk “with,” not “to,” others about short fiction. However, as it was in the classroom, if my love of the short story became more a monologue than a dialogue, so be it. If no one responds to my remarks, I will still continue writing them.
I started the blog as a stimulus to myself—something to keep me reading, not aimlessly, but with a purpose—something to keep me writing, not carelessly, but with care. That seems to have worked for me. I feel compelled to write at least one blog entry a week, which means that I must continue reading new short stories, continue keeping up with what others are saying about the short story, and continue thinking about the unique characteristics of the form that make it, in my opinion, more aesthetically and psychologically complex and interesting than the novel.
Because there has been some publicity recently about bloggers receiving rewards for publicizing certain products—so-called “Mom” bloggers who get junkets and goodies—I thought I should state here quite emphatically that I receive no rewards from publishers for my comments about new collections of short stories. I do write occasional reviews for reference works and newspapers, for which I receive a copy of the book—either from the publisher or the publication where the review appears. And yes, I do receive a modest check for the published review. And yes, I do also comment on the book on this blog if it is of theoretical or critical interest. But I always read the stories I write about carefully, and at least twice, and I always try to provide a fair and well-considered evaluation. The only thing I wish to "promote" is getting more people to read and appreciate short stories. Wryly, I might add, no one should worry that anyone will try to "buy" my favor. The short story is just not a commercial commodity worth the seller's trouble.
On a personal note, I have commented occasionally that although I do not often read novels, I do “listen” to them on my daily morning walks with our dog Shannon. Today, the first birthday of this blog, is also the 15th birthday of Shannon. I just finished listening to, of all things, Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” a book I had not read in fifty years, a book that came out when I was sixteen and which I thought was the true document of my generation.
When I was in undergraduate school, I wrote a column for my college newspaper in which I paraded as a “Beatnik” kind of guy; it was accompanied by a drawing a friend of mine did of me in a beret, with a pointy goatee, and a set of bongo drums between my knees. There are probably some books we read in our youth that we should never read again. Instead of nodding sagely this time as I listened to Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity pontificate about being beat and hip, I chuckled. Instead of longing to hit the road with my gang, picking up cool chicks and drinking lots of beer, I tsk tsked at the juvenile antics and irresponsibility of Kerouac and Cassidy and the rest.
I grow old . . .I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
In three months, I will be sixty-nine. I trust that in a year from now, as I near seventy, I will still be writing this blog, still reading short stories, still urging others to read them, still writing about them, still listening to novels on my walks with Shannon. It is less a walk than an amble now, taking twice as long to cover half the distance we used to cover. But Shannon still explores the world around her, sniffing for scents that she has somehow missed on her many journeys. I do not get impatient. I understand. I do the same.
In the past year, I have written sixty blog posts for this site, most of them fairly substantial discussions of new short story collections, individual short stories, and other matters of note to those interested in the short story as a form. Although I have not always succeeded, I have tried to focus on significant theoretical and generic issues, using individual collections and stories as examples of those issues.
I do not have a counter for this blog, but noticed this morning that the counter that ticks off those who have visited my user profile turned over to 1,000. I don’t know what this means. I really do not know how many people have visited the blog occasionally or how many read it regularly, although I do have twenty-eight “followers,” whatever that means.
One writes to be read, so I am grateful to those who read this blog regularly and who stumble on it while doing a Google search. I am especially grateful to those who take the time to write comments. I have tried to respond to every comment I have received, and I will continue to do so. I started the blog as a means by which I could engage in dialogue with other short story fans about the form that we love. The one thing I miss most since my retirement is the opportunity to talk “with,” not “to,” others about short fiction. However, as it was in the classroom, if my love of the short story became more a monologue than a dialogue, so be it. If no one responds to my remarks, I will still continue writing them.
I started the blog as a stimulus to myself—something to keep me reading, not aimlessly, but with a purpose—something to keep me writing, not carelessly, but with care. That seems to have worked for me. I feel compelled to write at least one blog entry a week, which means that I must continue reading new short stories, continue keeping up with what others are saying about the short story, and continue thinking about the unique characteristics of the form that make it, in my opinion, more aesthetically and psychologically complex and interesting than the novel.
Because there has been some publicity recently about bloggers receiving rewards for publicizing certain products—so-called “Mom” bloggers who get junkets and goodies—I thought I should state here quite emphatically that I receive no rewards from publishers for my comments about new collections of short stories. I do write occasional reviews for reference works and newspapers, for which I receive a copy of the book—either from the publisher or the publication where the review appears. And yes, I do receive a modest check for the published review. And yes, I do also comment on the book on this blog if it is of theoretical or critical interest. But I always read the stories I write about carefully, and at least twice, and I always try to provide a fair and well-considered evaluation. The only thing I wish to "promote" is getting more people to read and appreciate short stories. Wryly, I might add, no one should worry that anyone will try to "buy" my favor. The short story is just not a commercial commodity worth the seller's trouble.
On a personal note, I have commented occasionally that although I do not often read novels, I do “listen” to them on my daily morning walks with our dog Shannon. Today, the first birthday of this blog, is also the 15th birthday of Shannon. I just finished listening to, of all things, Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” a book I had not read in fifty years, a book that came out when I was sixteen and which I thought was the true document of my generation.
When I was in undergraduate school, I wrote a column for my college newspaper in which I paraded as a “Beatnik” kind of guy; it was accompanied by a drawing a friend of mine did of me in a beret, with a pointy goatee, and a set of bongo drums between my knees. There are probably some books we read in our youth that we should never read again. Instead of nodding sagely this time as I listened to Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity pontificate about being beat and hip, I chuckled. Instead of longing to hit the road with my gang, picking up cool chicks and drinking lots of beer, I tsk tsked at the juvenile antics and irresponsibility of Kerouac and Cassidy and the rest.
I grow old . . .I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
In three months, I will be sixty-nine. I trust that in a year from now, as I near seventy, I will still be writing this blog, still reading short stories, still urging others to read them, still writing about them, still listening to novels on my walks with Shannon. It is less a walk than an amble now, taking twice as long to cover half the distance we used to cover. But Shannon still explores the world around her, sniffing for scents that she has somehow missed on her many journeys. I do not get impatient. I understand. I do the same.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Praise for the Short Story in the Wall Street Journal: Will Wonders Never Cease?
“When Brevity is a Virtue,” an article by Alexandra Alter in today’s Wall Street Journal, (Nov. 13, 2009; online at http://online.wsj.com) throws a welcome new spotlight on the short story by noting that the form seems poised this fall to get its due with new collections from Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ha Jin.
Alter rightly points out that when great short stories are praised for having “novelistic” qualities, it is a subtle disparagement, instructing us that the novel is the highest literary achievement.
Alter suggests that changing technology and reading habits are giving the short story a boost, as readers discover the form in online literary journals and download short stories to their ipods and e-readers.
However, the article also reminds us of the prevailing opinion among agents and publishers that short stories do not sell. The fact that Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge has sold 472,000 copies after winning the Pulitzer is, according to these Nay Sayers, an anomaly. And Alice Munro’s winning the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for the body of her work is because, well, “She’s Alice Munro, and by the way, why the hell doesn’t she write a novel?” Reviewers forgive her by claiming that her stories are “novelistic.” Munro’s editor Ann Close is quoted by Alter as saying that the precision and vigor of Munro’s plotting and prose allows her to pack as much into her stories as many novels contain. Pack what stuff?
Munro’s new collection, Too Much Happiness, has been out in Canada and the United Kingdom for the past three months and will be released by Knopf in the U.S. next week. The Los Angeles Times published a review of the book this past Sunday, Nov. 8. All the stories have been published previously, mostly in The New Yorker and Harper’s, and I have read them as they have appeared. On a previous blog, I talked a bit about one of the stories, “On Wenlock Edge.”
I will post a blog on Too Much Happiness in a couple of weeks when I get the book and have had a chance to make sure that Munro has not changed the stories since their original publication in magazines. I will try to make some sense out of the frequent, somewhat disparaging claim that Munro’s stories are like novels, an accusation she knows very well, as evidenced by this wry comment from the story “Fiction” in her new collection:
“A collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.”
None of the short story Nay Sayers can say that Alice Munro is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, not even Oprah, who has said she does not like short stories because she “wants more.” Desiring quantity rather than quality is an Oprah problem that I wish she would not impose on the thousands of her book club members.
Alter rightly points out that when great short stories are praised for having “novelistic” qualities, it is a subtle disparagement, instructing us that the novel is the highest literary achievement.
Alter suggests that changing technology and reading habits are giving the short story a boost, as readers discover the form in online literary journals and download short stories to their ipods and e-readers.
However, the article also reminds us of the prevailing opinion among agents and publishers that short stories do not sell. The fact that Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge has sold 472,000 copies after winning the Pulitzer is, according to these Nay Sayers, an anomaly. And Alice Munro’s winning the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for the body of her work is because, well, “She’s Alice Munro, and by the way, why the hell doesn’t she write a novel?” Reviewers forgive her by claiming that her stories are “novelistic.” Munro’s editor Ann Close is quoted by Alter as saying that the precision and vigor of Munro’s plotting and prose allows her to pack as much into her stories as many novels contain. Pack what stuff?
Munro’s new collection, Too Much Happiness, has been out in Canada and the United Kingdom for the past three months and will be released by Knopf in the U.S. next week. The Los Angeles Times published a review of the book this past Sunday, Nov. 8. All the stories have been published previously, mostly in The New Yorker and Harper’s, and I have read them as they have appeared. On a previous blog, I talked a bit about one of the stories, “On Wenlock Edge.”
I will post a blog on Too Much Happiness in a couple of weeks when I get the book and have had a chance to make sure that Munro has not changed the stories since their original publication in magazines. I will try to make some sense out of the frequent, somewhat disparaging claim that Munro’s stories are like novels, an accusation she knows very well, as evidenced by this wry comment from the story “Fiction” in her new collection:
“A collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.”
None of the short story Nay Sayers can say that Alice Munro is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, not even Oprah, who has said she does not like short stories because she “wants more.” Desiring quantity rather than quality is an Oprah problem that I wish she would not impose on the thousands of her book club members.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Oprah Finally Chooses a Collection of Short Stories for her Book Club
On one of her recent video blogs, Oprah pronounced vigorously (and the thousands of her book club members must have nodded their heads in agreement) “I don’t like short stories. I am not a fan of short stories. They leave me wanting more.”
However, she did finally choose a short story collection, and thousands of her book club members rushed to Amazon and Costco to buy it. As usual with the TV cultural Diva’s book choices, it landed on several bestseller lists and jumped up high on Amazon’s sales list. Today, it was # 31, and there were seventy rave “reviews” of the book from Amazon customers.
The book is Say You’re One of Them, by the Nigerian-born Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan, a collection of two novellas and three short stories, about the horrors of street life and genocide in Africa, as experienced by children. “What Language is That?” is the story of a 6-year-old girl who is forbidden to associate with her “Best Friend” because of “faith differences.” In “Ex-mas Feast,” a Kenyan boy, age 8, tells of his 12-year-old sister’s work as a prostitute to help support her family. In “Luxurious Hearses,” a teenage Muslim boy tries to get out of northern Nigeria on a busload of Christians heading south. In “Fattening for Gabon,” a 10-year-old boy and his sister are sent to live with his uncle, who wants to sell them to human traffickers. “My Parents Bedroom” is told by a 9-year-old girl whose Hutu father kills her Tutsi mother.
Oprah has raved about the book on her show and her video blogs, and, although I have always resented the weight Oprah has in influencing the sales of books, I am happy that she has finally chosen a collection of short stories. I just wish they had been better short stories.
In my opinion, Akpan is a capable writer. He is from a southern Nigerian village, but his parents were educated teachers, and he learned English early and grew up reading Shakespeare and the Brontes. He is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Michigan, and his first published story, “An Ex-Mas Feast” appeared in the “Debut Fiction” issue of The New Yorker on June 13 & 20, 2005. He has, what Alan Cheuse called in the Chicago Tribune, a “translucent style,” a straightforward, clear style that does not draw attention to itself as either lyrical or sentimental, but serves as a fairly clear glass through which one witnesses horrors of poverty, ignorance, and intolerance.
The issue Akpan’s stories raise for me is that of “mind vs. heart.” I think Cheuse is right when he says that the stories “nearly render the mind helpless and throw the heart into a hopeless erratic rhythm out of fear, out of pity, out of the shame of being only a few degrees of separation removed from these monstrous modern circumstances.”
I don’t really want my mind rendered helpless when I read, and I distrust fiction that, sans mind, tries to get to my “heart,” a word that I reserve for the mindless pump that a surgeon laid bare a couple of years ago to perform for me a triple bypass. “Heart” is a word that Oprah, on her show and video blogs, uses easily and frequently. She recently said that Akpan’s “Ex-Mas Feast” "opened her heart."
And the seventy or so readers who have posted their comments on Amazon.com proclaim that their hearts also have been opened. If Say You’re One of Them does anything to make people more aware of the horrors of life in much of Africa, because of poverty and murderous intolerance, I applaud the book as a valuable social document. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a valuable social document; that does not make it a valuable work of literature.
The most thoughtful review I have read of Akpan’s book is by Charles Taylor in The New York Times. Akpan has said in an interview that the world is not looking at the miseries in Africa. Taylor agrees, but adds, “looking isn’t enough for art.”
I quote below the last paragraph of Taylor’s review:
“For some, the impulse to repel will be seized on as proof of the importance and power of Akpan’s writing. Aesthetic judgments are usually the first casualty when any writer addresses a humanitarian disaster, and it would be silly to deny that sometimes a writer’s moral urgency can render aesthetic judgment beside the point. Still, though it seems self-evident, importance of subject matter does not equal quality of execution. No matter how much Akpan particularizes his characters’ plights—a one-handed Muslim boy trying to hide his identity from a busload of Christians; a 10-year-old and his sister being readied for slavery or worse; a Rwandan girl watching the madness that overcame her country invade her house—they remain little more than stand-ins for the suffering millions. They are not just marked by their suffering; they are nothing more than their suffering, and therefore on some basic level they are faceless. Humanist empathy devoid of the distinctly human is finally not art but merely grim reportage.”
A webcast with Oprah and Uwem Akpan is scheduled for Mon. Nov. 9 at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time. You can find it on Oprah’s website.
However, she did finally choose a short story collection, and thousands of her book club members rushed to Amazon and Costco to buy it. As usual with the TV cultural Diva’s book choices, it landed on several bestseller lists and jumped up high on Amazon’s sales list. Today, it was # 31, and there were seventy rave “reviews” of the book from Amazon customers.
The book is Say You’re One of Them, by the Nigerian-born Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan, a collection of two novellas and three short stories, about the horrors of street life and genocide in Africa, as experienced by children. “What Language is That?” is the story of a 6-year-old girl who is forbidden to associate with her “Best Friend” because of “faith differences.” In “Ex-mas Feast,” a Kenyan boy, age 8, tells of his 12-year-old sister’s work as a prostitute to help support her family. In “Luxurious Hearses,” a teenage Muslim boy tries to get out of northern Nigeria on a busload of Christians heading south. In “Fattening for Gabon,” a 10-year-old boy and his sister are sent to live with his uncle, who wants to sell them to human traffickers. “My Parents Bedroom” is told by a 9-year-old girl whose Hutu father kills her Tutsi mother.
Oprah has raved about the book on her show and her video blogs, and, although I have always resented the weight Oprah has in influencing the sales of books, I am happy that she has finally chosen a collection of short stories. I just wish they had been better short stories.
In my opinion, Akpan is a capable writer. He is from a southern Nigerian village, but his parents were educated teachers, and he learned English early and grew up reading Shakespeare and the Brontes. He is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Michigan, and his first published story, “An Ex-Mas Feast” appeared in the “Debut Fiction” issue of The New Yorker on June 13 & 20, 2005. He has, what Alan Cheuse called in the Chicago Tribune, a “translucent style,” a straightforward, clear style that does not draw attention to itself as either lyrical or sentimental, but serves as a fairly clear glass through which one witnesses horrors of poverty, ignorance, and intolerance.
The issue Akpan’s stories raise for me is that of “mind vs. heart.” I think Cheuse is right when he says that the stories “nearly render the mind helpless and throw the heart into a hopeless erratic rhythm out of fear, out of pity, out of the shame of being only a few degrees of separation removed from these monstrous modern circumstances.”
I don’t really want my mind rendered helpless when I read, and I distrust fiction that, sans mind, tries to get to my “heart,” a word that I reserve for the mindless pump that a surgeon laid bare a couple of years ago to perform for me a triple bypass. “Heart” is a word that Oprah, on her show and video blogs, uses easily and frequently. She recently said that Akpan’s “Ex-Mas Feast” "opened her heart."
And the seventy or so readers who have posted their comments on Amazon.com proclaim that their hearts also have been opened. If Say You’re One of Them does anything to make people more aware of the horrors of life in much of Africa, because of poverty and murderous intolerance, I applaud the book as a valuable social document. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a valuable social document; that does not make it a valuable work of literature.
The most thoughtful review I have read of Akpan’s book is by Charles Taylor in The New York Times. Akpan has said in an interview that the world is not looking at the miseries in Africa. Taylor agrees, but adds, “looking isn’t enough for art.”
I quote below the last paragraph of Taylor’s review:
“For some, the impulse to repel will be seized on as proof of the importance and power of Akpan’s writing. Aesthetic judgments are usually the first casualty when any writer addresses a humanitarian disaster, and it would be silly to deny that sometimes a writer’s moral urgency can render aesthetic judgment beside the point. Still, though it seems self-evident, importance of subject matter does not equal quality of execution. No matter how much Akpan particularizes his characters’ plights—a one-handed Muslim boy trying to hide his identity from a busload of Christians; a 10-year-old and his sister being readied for slavery or worse; a Rwandan girl watching the madness that overcame her country invade her house—they remain little more than stand-ins for the suffering millions. They are not just marked by their suffering; they are nothing more than their suffering, and therefore on some basic level they are faceless. Humanist empathy devoid of the distinctly human is finally not art but merely grim reportage.”
A webcast with Oprah and Uwem Akpan is scheduled for Mon. Nov. 9 at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time. You can find it on Oprah’s website.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Orhan Pamuk: A Chapter in a Novel is not Necessarily a Short Story
Orhan Pamuk, the first Turk to win the Nobel Prize (2006), has a new novel released this week, The Museum of Innocence, translated by Maureen Freely, published by Knopf. Favorable reviews appeared today (Oct. 21) in The Los Angeles Times and yesterday in The Washington Post.
I have no intention of commenting on the novel, for I have not read it, but I do want to make a few comments about a chapter that appeared in the Sept. 7, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, entitled “Distant Relations.” According to Marie Arana in the Post and Tim Rutten in the Times, The Museum of Innocence is a “spellbinding, engrossing, mesmerizing” story of a romantic/erotic obsession. The story in The New Yorker is about the beginnings of that obsession.
Kemal, a 30-year old bachelor, is engaged to a woman named Sibel. Both are of the same class, urbane, educated, and sophisticated. American educated, Kemal lives with his parents in a wealthy neighborhood.
The story begins with this sentence: “The series of events and coincidences that would change my entire life began on April 27, 1975, when Sibel happened to spot a purse designed by the famous Jenny Colon in a shop window as we were walking along Valikonagi Avenue, enjoying the cool spring evening.”
When Kemal goes into the shop the next day to buy the purse for Sibel, he encounters an 18-year-old girl, named Fusun, who he recognizes as a poor “distant relation.” He is immediately attracted to her: “I felt my heart rise into my throat, with the force of an immense wave about toe crash against the shore.”
As usual with such fascinations, it is something inexplicably physical: “My eyes traveled from her empty shoe over her long bare legs. It wasn’t even May yet, and they were already tanned.” “With slender dexterous fingers, [she] removed the balls of crumbled tissue paper.” “I was admiring her honey-hued arms and her quick elegant gestures.” As Kemal leaves the shop, he pauses for a moment: “My ghost had left my body and was now, in some corner of Heaven, embracing Fusun and kissing her.”
Also, as is usual in such fascinations, what Kemal sees in Fusun is himself. When he must take the purse back because his fiancé says it is a fake, he “cannot deny the startling truth that when I looked at Fusun I saw someone familiar, someone I felt I knew intimately. She resembled me…I felt I could easily put myself in her place, could understand her deeply.”
When Fusun begins to cry about the returned purse, he holds her, “which made my head spin. Perhaps it was because I was trying to suppress my desire, stronger each time I touched her, that I conjured up the illusion that we had known each other for years.”
However, “Fearful of the sexual beast now threatening to rear its head, I took my hand from her hair.” However, he does not leave the store until he has figured out a way to meet her later in an unoccupied apartment owned by his mother. “Back in the street, my shame and guilt mixed with so many images of bliss in the unseasonable warmth of that April afternoon that the very sidewalks of Nisantasi seemed aglow with a mysterious yellow.”
The story ends with Kemal’s mother pressing the key to the apartment in his hand, giving him a look like the one she gave him as a child, warning him that “life held unsuspected dangers that were far deeper and more treacherous than, for instance, failing to take proper care of a key.”
According to the reviews of this book, which I will probably never read, Kemal “takes” Fusion’s virginity and begins an affair with her. However, Fusun does not love Kemal and marries an unsuccessful art film writer. Kemal’s obsession becomes more intense. He loses Sibel to another man and begins stalking the neighborhood where Fusun and her husband live, stealing cigarette butts, underwear, bits of jewelry, and keeping them in the apartment where they had first had sex—which, of course, becomes his “Museum of Innocence.”
Well, being the irredeemable romantic that I am, I love novels of romantic/erotic obsession. At the top of my list of favorite novels are Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. However, it seems to me that for such an obsessive novel to succeed, it has to be consummately written. It has to be miraculous in its style. For it is its style that “mesmerizes,” not its mere story, which can so easily devolve into the merely sentimental. I realize that quoting passages out of context, as I have above, can be misleading. But I just cannot take a man who talks the way Kemal does seriously. The language just does not create a world that makes the story transformative.
As I have argued many times in this blog, it is much easier to forgive careless writing in a novel than it is in a short story. Reading a novel, (Lord knows there is so much of it) one can certainly get caught up in the mere plot or an obsessive character and be “carried away” or “mesmerized,” as the reviewers in the LA Times and the Washington Post seem to have been, ignoring stylistic infelicities, easy sentimentalities, and phrases that could have used another rewrite.
Stylistically, structurally, and thematically, the fragment of Pamuk’s new novel that appeared recently in The New Yorker makes a poor short story. Stylistically, it is casual and careless. It includes long passages about the nature of Fusun’s “distant relation” to Kemal that are not relevant to the fragment. It focuses on a central event—the purchase and return of the ostensibly fake purse—that has not significance except to make possible the initial meeting of Kemal and Fusun—which could have been accomplished in many other ways with absolutely no loss of thematic significance.
I have no objection to writers publishing sections of upcoming novels in The New Yorker. It is a great way to “double dip” into the meager pot of money that writers must scrabble for. I just wish The New Yorker would not call them short stories. I just finished “listening to” Louise Erdrich’s Plague of Doves (As you might recall, I seldom “read” novels, but listen to them on my Ipod as I take my morning walk, accompanied by my aging dog, Shannon.) I had read many of the “stories” that make up Erdrich’s novel previously, mostly in The New Yorker, or as they appeared in Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Awards Stories. But Erdrich’s novels are, by their very nature episodic, the parts of which are detachable. She seems to have written them as self-sufficient tales—creating a stylized rhythm and a magical-realist world that I often find self-indulgent, but that I can become “engrossed” in or “mesmerized” by.
The obsessive novels that I love so much—Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The French Lieutenant’s Woman—amaze me every time I read them. I cannot quite believe that ordinary humans wrote them. In my humble human opinion, Orhan Pamuk is just an ordinary human.
I have no intention of commenting on the novel, for I have not read it, but I do want to make a few comments about a chapter that appeared in the Sept. 7, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, entitled “Distant Relations.” According to Marie Arana in the Post and Tim Rutten in the Times, The Museum of Innocence is a “spellbinding, engrossing, mesmerizing” story of a romantic/erotic obsession. The story in The New Yorker is about the beginnings of that obsession.
Kemal, a 30-year old bachelor, is engaged to a woman named Sibel. Both are of the same class, urbane, educated, and sophisticated. American educated, Kemal lives with his parents in a wealthy neighborhood.
The story begins with this sentence: “The series of events and coincidences that would change my entire life began on April 27, 1975, when Sibel happened to spot a purse designed by the famous Jenny Colon in a shop window as we were walking along Valikonagi Avenue, enjoying the cool spring evening.”
When Kemal goes into the shop the next day to buy the purse for Sibel, he encounters an 18-year-old girl, named Fusun, who he recognizes as a poor “distant relation.” He is immediately attracted to her: “I felt my heart rise into my throat, with the force of an immense wave about toe crash against the shore.”
As usual with such fascinations, it is something inexplicably physical: “My eyes traveled from her empty shoe over her long bare legs. It wasn’t even May yet, and they were already tanned.” “With slender dexterous fingers, [she] removed the balls of crumbled tissue paper.” “I was admiring her honey-hued arms and her quick elegant gestures.” As Kemal leaves the shop, he pauses for a moment: “My ghost had left my body and was now, in some corner of Heaven, embracing Fusun and kissing her.”
Also, as is usual in such fascinations, what Kemal sees in Fusun is himself. When he must take the purse back because his fiancé says it is a fake, he “cannot deny the startling truth that when I looked at Fusun I saw someone familiar, someone I felt I knew intimately. She resembled me…I felt I could easily put myself in her place, could understand her deeply.”
When Fusun begins to cry about the returned purse, he holds her, “which made my head spin. Perhaps it was because I was trying to suppress my desire, stronger each time I touched her, that I conjured up the illusion that we had known each other for years.”
However, “Fearful of the sexual beast now threatening to rear its head, I took my hand from her hair.” However, he does not leave the store until he has figured out a way to meet her later in an unoccupied apartment owned by his mother. “Back in the street, my shame and guilt mixed with so many images of bliss in the unseasonable warmth of that April afternoon that the very sidewalks of Nisantasi seemed aglow with a mysterious yellow.”
The story ends with Kemal’s mother pressing the key to the apartment in his hand, giving him a look like the one she gave him as a child, warning him that “life held unsuspected dangers that were far deeper and more treacherous than, for instance, failing to take proper care of a key.”
According to the reviews of this book, which I will probably never read, Kemal “takes” Fusion’s virginity and begins an affair with her. However, Fusun does not love Kemal and marries an unsuccessful art film writer. Kemal’s obsession becomes more intense. He loses Sibel to another man and begins stalking the neighborhood where Fusun and her husband live, stealing cigarette butts, underwear, bits of jewelry, and keeping them in the apartment where they had first had sex—which, of course, becomes his “Museum of Innocence.”
Well, being the irredeemable romantic that I am, I love novels of romantic/erotic obsession. At the top of my list of favorite novels are Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. However, it seems to me that for such an obsessive novel to succeed, it has to be consummately written. It has to be miraculous in its style. For it is its style that “mesmerizes,” not its mere story, which can so easily devolve into the merely sentimental. I realize that quoting passages out of context, as I have above, can be misleading. But I just cannot take a man who talks the way Kemal does seriously. The language just does not create a world that makes the story transformative.
As I have argued many times in this blog, it is much easier to forgive careless writing in a novel than it is in a short story. Reading a novel, (Lord knows there is so much of it) one can certainly get caught up in the mere plot or an obsessive character and be “carried away” or “mesmerized,” as the reviewers in the LA Times and the Washington Post seem to have been, ignoring stylistic infelicities, easy sentimentalities, and phrases that could have used another rewrite.
Stylistically, structurally, and thematically, the fragment of Pamuk’s new novel that appeared recently in The New Yorker makes a poor short story. Stylistically, it is casual and careless. It includes long passages about the nature of Fusun’s “distant relation” to Kemal that are not relevant to the fragment. It focuses on a central event—the purchase and return of the ostensibly fake purse—that has not significance except to make possible the initial meeting of Kemal and Fusun—which could have been accomplished in many other ways with absolutely no loss of thematic significance.
I have no objection to writers publishing sections of upcoming novels in The New Yorker. It is a great way to “double dip” into the meager pot of money that writers must scrabble for. I just wish The New Yorker would not call them short stories. I just finished “listening to” Louise Erdrich’s Plague of Doves (As you might recall, I seldom “read” novels, but listen to them on my Ipod as I take my morning walk, accompanied by my aging dog, Shannon.) I had read many of the “stories” that make up Erdrich’s novel previously, mostly in The New Yorker, or as they appeared in Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Awards Stories. But Erdrich’s novels are, by their very nature episodic, the parts of which are detachable. She seems to have written them as self-sufficient tales—creating a stylized rhythm and a magical-realist world that I often find self-indulgent, but that I can become “engrossed” in or “mesmerized” by.
The obsessive novels that I love so much—Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The French Lieutenant’s Woman—amaze me every time I read them. I cannot quite believe that ordinary humans wrote them. In my humble human opinion, Orhan Pamuk is just an ordinary human.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Poe: Baltimore comes to bury him; I come to praise him
Last week, in this bicentennial year of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, Baltimore staged a second wake and funeral procession for the writer most responsible for recognizing the unique characteristics of the short story as an artistic form. The following is a quote from The Baltimore Sun:
I did a book on Poe’s short fiction several years ago. He has always been a favorite of mine, much underestimated by many of my colleagues. I remember once when I was teaching a full semester course on Poe’s work, one of my fellow teachers said to me, “I don’t understand what you can find to say about Poe for a whole semester. I can barely fill up one class meeting on his work.”
In honor of Baltimore’s "reburial" of Poe, I come to praise him, not to bury him, by making a few comments on his contribution to the theory of the short story as a completely different narrative form than the novel.
It can be argued that a literary genre does not really exist as long as it is merely practiced. Because a genre concept is just that--a concept--it only truly comes into being when the rules and conventions which constitute it are articulated within the larger conceptual context of literature as a whole. Poe's rigor as a literary critic and genre theorist is thus as important for understanding his contribution to the short story form as is his skill as a short-story writer.
There is little doubt that Poe was, if nothing else, a thoroughgoing formalist, always more interested in the work's pattern, structure, conventions, and techniques than its reference to the external world or its social or psychological theme. The meaning of the work for Poe was its technique, so much so that in many of his stories he thematizes aesthetic and literary theory issues, making the creation and explication of unity the central thematic "truth" of the work.
Since there was no theory of the short prose tale when Poe was writing, he took theoretical ideas from those genres that did posses a critical history, such as drama and poetry, and applied them to the Gothic tale form which was popular during his time. The following generic elements are the most important ones Poe made use of: (1)the conventionalized and ritualized structure of the drama; (2)the metaphoric and self-contained unity of the lyric poem; (3)the technique of verisimilitude of the eighteenth-century novel; (4)the point of view and unifying tone of the eighteenth-century essay; and (5)the spiritual undercurrent and projective technique of the old romance and the Gothic story.
When you add to these the notion of prose assuming the spatial form of painting, which Poe suggested in the 1842 Hawthorne review, you have the basis for a new generic form. Poe's notion of short fiction as a picture is particularly important, for to see narrative as a painting is to see it as a design in space rather than a movement in time. Although the consequent implication of considering characters as static groupings in a composition means a loss of dramatic effect, this is compensated for by a gain in emphasis on overall pattern, which is equivalent to thematic design.
Poe’s 1842 Hawthorne review is of course the central document for understanding Poe's contribution to the theory of the short story, for it derives from his earlier discussions of the relationship between aesthetic unity and the concept of plot and looks forward to the ultimate implications of pattern and design in Eureka. The logic of the argument in the Hawthorne review is quite clear: What is most important in the literary work is unity; however, unity can only be achieved in a work which the reader can hold in the mind all at once. After the poem, traditionally the highest of high literary art, Poe says that the short tale has the most potential for being unified in the way the poem is. The effect of the tale is synonymous with its overall pattern or design, which is also synonymous with its theme or idea. Form and meaning emerge from the unity of the motifs of the story.
Poe carries his concern with unity of effect even further in "The Philosophy of Composition," for here he asserts the importance of considering the work backwards, that is, beginning with its end. Obviously, the possibility of beginning with the end is what distinguishes fiction from reality, what transforms reality into narrative discourse. A narrative, by its very nature, cannot be told until the events which it takes as its subject matter have already occurred. Therefore the "end" of the events, both in terms of their actual termination and in terms of the purpose to which the narrator binds them, is the beginning of the discourse.
It is hardly necessary to say that the only narrative which the reader ever gets is that which is already discourse, already ended as an event, so that there is nothing left for it but to move toward its end in an aesthetic, eventless way, i.e, via tone, metaphor, and all the other purely artistic conventions of fictional discourse.
"Edgar Allen Poe is finally getting the send-off he always deserved -- from a city that has spent decades claiming him as one of its own.
True, he's spent more than a century-and-a-half buried in the hallowed grounds surrounding Baltimore's Westminster Hall. It's also true that Baltimore isn't the only city celebrating Poe, in this bicentennial of his birth on Jan. 19, 1809. At least four other East Coast cities -- Richmond, Philadelphia, New York and Boston -- have legitimate claims to Poe's legacy. The five cities have been squabbling for years, and have spent the past year exploiting their connections to the pioneering writer and early master of the horror and mystery genres.
But Baltimore has something that none of the rest of them have. And over the coming week, his fans here are going to flaunt it for all it's worth -- in ways the macabre Mr. Poe would doubtless appreciate.
"We have the body!" says Poe fan Doreen Bolger, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law. No one else can say that."
Which explains why Baltimore will be holding a second wake, funeral procession and funeral for the long-dead Poe, 160 years after the first.
On an early October day in 1849, Poe was found walking the streets of the city, bedraggled, incoherent, possibly beaten up, dressed in clothes that didn't belong to him. He died four days later at Washington College Hospital (later Church Home & Hospital, closed in 2000) and was buried at Westminster the next day, after a sparsely attended three-minute service. His death warranted a paltry four-sentence obituary in The Sun. "This is Baltimore's chance," says Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, where a Wednesday-afternoon-and-evening viewing of the famed poet and author's body will begin a five-day commemoration of both his mysterious death on Oct. 7, 1849, and the quiet, almost secretive funeral services that followed. "This is what I've been working for, to honor Poe and to say, 'Thanks.' It's the least I could do."
I did a book on Poe’s short fiction several years ago. He has always been a favorite of mine, much underestimated by many of my colleagues. I remember once when I was teaching a full semester course on Poe’s work, one of my fellow teachers said to me, “I don’t understand what you can find to say about Poe for a whole semester. I can barely fill up one class meeting on his work.”
In honor of Baltimore’s "reburial" of Poe, I come to praise him, not to bury him, by making a few comments on his contribution to the theory of the short story as a completely different narrative form than the novel.
It can be argued that a literary genre does not really exist as long as it is merely practiced. Because a genre concept is just that--a concept--it only truly comes into being when the rules and conventions which constitute it are articulated within the larger conceptual context of literature as a whole. Poe's rigor as a literary critic and genre theorist is thus as important for understanding his contribution to the short story form as is his skill as a short-story writer.
There is little doubt that Poe was, if nothing else, a thoroughgoing formalist, always more interested in the work's pattern, structure, conventions, and techniques than its reference to the external world or its social or psychological theme. The meaning of the work for Poe was its technique, so much so that in many of his stories he thematizes aesthetic and literary theory issues, making the creation and explication of unity the central thematic "truth" of the work.
Since there was no theory of the short prose tale when Poe was writing, he took theoretical ideas from those genres that did posses a critical history, such as drama and poetry, and applied them to the Gothic tale form which was popular during his time. The following generic elements are the most important ones Poe made use of: (1)the conventionalized and ritualized structure of the drama; (2)the metaphoric and self-contained unity of the lyric poem; (3)the technique of verisimilitude of the eighteenth-century novel; (4)the point of view and unifying tone of the eighteenth-century essay; and (5)the spiritual undercurrent and projective technique of the old romance and the Gothic story.
When you add to these the notion of prose assuming the spatial form of painting, which Poe suggested in the 1842 Hawthorne review, you have the basis for a new generic form. Poe's notion of short fiction as a picture is particularly important, for to see narrative as a painting is to see it as a design in space rather than a movement in time. Although the consequent implication of considering characters as static groupings in a composition means a loss of dramatic effect, this is compensated for by a gain in emphasis on overall pattern, which is equivalent to thematic design.
Poe’s 1842 Hawthorne review is of course the central document for understanding Poe's contribution to the theory of the short story, for it derives from his earlier discussions of the relationship between aesthetic unity and the concept of plot and looks forward to the ultimate implications of pattern and design in Eureka. The logic of the argument in the Hawthorne review is quite clear: What is most important in the literary work is unity; however, unity can only be achieved in a work which the reader can hold in the mind all at once. After the poem, traditionally the highest of high literary art, Poe says that the short tale has the most potential for being unified in the way the poem is. The effect of the tale is synonymous with its overall pattern or design, which is also synonymous with its theme or idea. Form and meaning emerge from the unity of the motifs of the story.
Poe carries his concern with unity of effect even further in "The Philosophy of Composition," for here he asserts the importance of considering the work backwards, that is, beginning with its end. Obviously, the possibility of beginning with the end is what distinguishes fiction from reality, what transforms reality into narrative discourse. A narrative, by its very nature, cannot be told until the events which it takes as its subject matter have already occurred. Therefore the "end" of the events, both in terms of their actual termination and in terms of the purpose to which the narrator binds them, is the beginning of the discourse.
It is hardly necessary to say that the only narrative which the reader ever gets is that which is already discourse, already ended as an event, so that there is nothing left for it but to move toward its end in an aesthetic, eventless way, i.e, via tone, metaphor, and all the other purely artistic conventions of fictional discourse.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
The Short Story Trumps the Novel in National Book Award Anniversary Poll
The National Book Award is celebrating its 60th anniversary by conducting a poll to determine the “Best of the National Book Award in Fiction” since the award for fiction was first given in 1950. During that sixty-year period, seventy-one books won the award (Some years, an award was given for best fiction in paperback as well as hardback.) One hundred and forty writers from across the country then chose the six best of the best.
And the good news for lovers of the short story is that of those six, four, I repeat, four, were short story collections!
I am, of course, delighted with this result, although, since the choice was made by other writers, I am not surprised. Writers value, above all things, good writing, and, as I have always preached to my students and anyone else who would listen, the best writing is often to be found in the short story. It is no accident that the majority of passages selected for analysis in Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer are from short stories.
Short story writers, I think, are just more focused on the word and the sentence than novelists, who are more apt to think in macrocosmic terms of plot and character and perhaps be a little careless about the microcosmic elements of diction and syntax. The short story depends on form, on language, on rhythm to create a shimmering shape that rewards the careful reader with revelations about the subtlety and complexity of human experience that the novel often neglects or ignores.
If you would like to vote on which of the six books is the best of the best, go to:
http://www.nationalbook.org/nbafictionpoll.html
The six nominated books are:
The Collected Stories of William Faulkner, 1951
Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man, 1953
Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories, 1972
Thomas Pyncheon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 1974
Stories of John Cheever, 1981
Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, 1983
Over the sixty-year history of the award, twelve out of seventy-one awards for fiction have gone to short story collections. The remaining eight are:
Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel, 1959
Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, 1960
The Collected Stories of Katherine Ann Porter, 1966
John Barth, Chimera, 1973
Isaac B. Singer, Crown of Feathers, 1974
Ellen Gilchrist, Victory Over Japan, 1984
Bob Shacochis, Easy in the Islands, 1985
Andrea Barret, Ship Fever, 1996
Since they announced this poll, The National Book Award has posted a blog each day, with comments by various writers, on the seventy-one books that have won for fiction. You can read the blogs at:
www.nbafictionblog.org
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